Writing about, inspired by, and tangentially related to the work of the great Trinidadian Marxist

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Irregular Lives, the 2nd Amendment, and the Politics of Grief

Yesterday’s catastrophe is
irreducible. It stuns; it stops thought. It stopped mine, at least. I was in my
office at campus, working on an article. Completing a section, I took a break
to get another cup of coffee and to check out the news. And then I became
nauseous. I forgot about writing, I opened up 12 news sites, I turned on a live
feed of a news station, and I lingered over twitter feeds. Over three hours
passed and I hadn’t really moved—I just clicked here, clicked there, and
engaged in the kind of sense-making operations that many others were then
undertaking. I watched as collective grief transformed into demands for
collective action, into petitions for firmer gun regulation, even into programs
for amending the Constitution to get rid of the 2nd Amendment. I
watched as, with the same insistence, some demanded that we not “politicize”
this catastrophe, at least not yet; that we wait a day, at least, before the
political is superadded to this public event of intimate grief. The two
positions—the first liberal-progressive in spirit, the second not necessarily
not liberal, but certainly one that lends itself to a conservative tactics of
delay, to a tactics of diffusal and affective dissipation—establish a similar
relationship between the intimate and the political, between the event and the
collective meaning we might give it. The narrative would look like this: The
catastrophic event happens; it affects us, we who have become an intimate
public; and, having affected us, we turn to a collective political vocabulary
to negotiate and act upon the affectivity of the event. Intimate feeling turns
into a public meaning, and such meanings might have political consequences.
Grief—or any other kind of intimate affect—is thus staged as a condition of
possibility for public political activity. The latter only appears necessary—truly
necessary, such that such a catastrophe will not happen again—due to the way
that the former, the felt relation to the even, conducts us to activity. We are profoundly sad, and this sadness
propels us to political action—like, say, getting rid of the 2nd
Amendment.

But here’s the problem. This
understanding of the articulation of the intimate/affective to the political
presupposes the sundering of affect and politics. Moreover, it presupposes that
the purity of affect precedes the polemics constitutive of political being:
Whatever one’s politics, one will have felt horrible yesterday. The purity of
our affective lives ensures us access to the pure catastrophe of the event, and
guards our motivations from becoming crassly political—even if, say, we want to
undertake the eminently politic work of amending the Constitution. But—and
here, finally, is the problem—what if the political precedes the affective?
What if modes of collective regulation produce what can be felt as an intimate
event? We are seeing, now, that grief over yesterday’s catastrophe is providing
the condition of possibility for amending the 2nd Amendment. But
what of that grief—how was it formed in such a way that it would, almost
naturally, mobilize itself into a public vocabulary of redress, of
counter-amendment? I want to suggest that it is the 2nd Amendment
itself—the history from which it emerged, the culture in which it is embedded—that
produces and regulates what can appear as grievable, mournable loss. Let’s
begin thinking about this regulation of grief by looking at an ungrievable
crisis.

It is obvious, in the wake
of this catastrophe, that not all catastrophes matter equally, that not all
catastrophes can accede to the category of the catastrophic. It is obvious that
not all catastrophes participate in the obviousness constitutive of the
catastrophic. Over the summer, for instance, Chicago went through a horrific period
of gun violence, of spiking homicide numbers. While this violence achieved
national legiblity, it did so not as a catastrophe, but as an on-going crisis,
as something that, while exceptional, was ordinary. This crisis achieved
ordinariness due to the conjoint operation of its temporalization and its spatialization.
Taking place over multiple days, multiple months, the time of this crisis was
diffused; it lacked the punctuality of an event. This crisis also took place in
“gangland,” in a racialized space where the ordinary is always already in
crisis, anyhow. The mounting body count did occasion public outcry, but this
outcry was bizarrely regularized through the crisis’ mode of appearance:
through statistics, charts, graphs. The deaths were publically considered
horrendous, but they were met without weeping; Rahm never cried. The deaths
were a police problem, not a collective political problem; they were a
particular and particularizable problem, one endemic to racialized poverty. A
police problem, these non-catastrophic deaths did not really engender a broad
movement designed to take down the 2nd Amendment.

How does this instance of
ungrievable, ordinary crisis derive from the 2nd Amendment’s mode of
affective regulation, such that this crisis would barely call into question the
utility of the 2nd Amendment? Let’s think about what the 2nd
Amendment is. We want to think of the 2nd Amendment as having
emerged out of a concern for national self-defense, of protecting the family
from depredations of the King and Crown or of the emergent federal state. In
those terms, we can almost make sense of it. These “well regulated militias”—and
let’s laugh, as historians of the colonial Americas, at the ideas that such a “well
regulated” crew ever existed—and the well-armed citizenry existed, we think, to
protect the U.S. from a kind of political enslavement. And that’s not untrue;
tropes of tyranny and enslavement mark the debates prior to ratification of the
constitution and the amendments. Good ole Teddy Sedgwick declared it “a
chimerical idea to suppose that a country like this could ever be enslaved…Is
it possible…that an army could be raised for the purpose of enslaving
themselves or their brethren? or, if raised whether they could subdue a nation
of freemen, who know how to prize liberty and who have arms in their hands?”
The problem, of course, is that colonial militias typically did far more work
ensuring the continued enslavement of slaves than in defending home and hearth
from British redcoats. In most slave states in the Americas, participation in a
“well regulated militia” was compulsory. Even if such militias never acted—as
they did in the suppression, say, of Nat Turner’s Rebellion—their very presence
was useful in intimidating slaves from actualizing collective freedom dreams.
Moreover, possession of firearms and possession of slaves are statistically
related. “Guns are more common in early American inventories,” write
James Lindgren and Justin Heather, “where the decedent was male, Southern,
rural, slave-owning, or above the lowest social class[.]” (“Decedent” because
their data sets were constructed through probate records.) The likelihood of
owning a gun increased as did the size of one’s slave possessions: “In 1774,
large slave-owners have 4.3 times as high odds of owning a gun as small
slave-owners or those who owned no slaves.” Gun ownership was intimately linked
to regulating racialized and stratified populations inside of the nation.

Put simply, the 2nd
Amendment emerged out of a juridico-politico-cultural matrix in which bearing
arms ensured the sovereignty of the white protestant male. (You can check out
the English Bill of Rights here
to see how this right, in England, emerged to enable the defense of such white
prot dudes from “Papists”—itself a racial category in the Anglo Atlantic.) We
see traces of this matrix in the vocabulary of the amendment itself—“the
security of a free state,” “the people”—terms that mark sections of a
population off from others. We might think that such history has nothing to do
with us today: there are no more slaves, after all, and descendents of slaves
can own guns like anyone else. Yet, the cultural norms and practices that
concreted themselves in the 2nd Amendment continue to regulate the
distinction between mournable and unmournable life, between grievous
catastrophe and non-catastrophic modes of not-being-alive, of death without
weeping. By enabling a population—“the people” who live “in a free state”—to
defend itself against those who live in a state of unfreedom, the amendment
participated in the material and symbolic assignment of value to lives worth
living, and thus deaths worth grieving.

We think of the 2nd
Amendment as we think of all rights-claims: it works through negation, it says,
“Don’t take my guns away.” But it operates positively, too. The 2nd
Amendment valorizes one particular form of life by giving this valued life the
gift of violence, the capacity to undo other modes of living that interfered
with its flourishing. All of us now can perhaps own a gun, but the simple
possession of a gun does not mean that we have traversed the threshold of
political legibility required to live a mournable life. We can see the enduring
capacity of the 2nd Amendment to regulate grief and the grievable in
the categories that we are deploying to mourn yesterday’s tragedy. I’ve been
stunned by the heteronormativity and reproductive futurism that informs our
collective mourning. “They had their entire lives ahead of them—birthdays,
graduations, weddings, kids of their own,” Obama said, as he “react[ed] not as
a president, but as anyone else would—as a parent.” Here, straightness is both
the object and optic of mourning: proleptically straight children will never be
able to have “weddings” and have “kids of their own,” and only those who have
done so, the “parent,” have full access to the overwhelming grief of the event.
Queerness—alternative modes of life—can neither be mourned, nor can queers
properly mourn. I’ve been struck, too, by the non-racialization of the victims,
whiteness being the presumed race unless otherwise stated. “It’s like a Norman
Rockwell painting,” I heard one reporter say of Newtown—as if such picturesque
normalcy intensified the tragedy of the event.

If we are to (am)end the 2nd
Amendment, we must take care to uproot its enduring capacity to regulate grief,
to regulate determinations of well-lived lives worthy of mourning. School
shootings induce such horror due in part to the way in which instruments
developed to ensure the flourishing of “well regulated” life—normal life,
straight life, white life—catastrophically redound against that population. The
violent, on-going crises of the everyday that beset life less well regulated—the
lives of black men in “gangland” Chicago, the lives of queers, the lives of the
poor, and so on—do not and cannot achieve the same kind of catastrophic
legibility. The 2nd Amendment never intended to cover such
unregulated life, it never intended to provide it the mechanisms of protection
required to flourish. As we grieve, as this grief propels us to action, we need
to remain conscious of how this grief has already been formed and fabricated by
histories that produce unmournable lives and ungrievable losses. As we seek to
regulate laws that inhibit regular lives from being lived, we need to attend to
the irregularity at the margins of normal life, to the (ir)regular crises of
the everyday that never congeal themselves into a moment of catastrophic
tragedy.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

I grieve for the young man who performed this horrendous act as well. He is part of an isolated subculture of mentally ill who only gain attention on occasions like this. It might behoove our politicians to spend some more time looking at healthcare issues as well as gun control.....considering healthcare a right, not a privilege, even for the mentally ill. People born with mental illness lead tolerable lives at best and our culture does very little to alleviate this. While gun control is certainly a topic here, wouldn't it even be more powerful to change tormented lives in such a way that this young man wouldn't have a need for a gun? I think he falls in the category with the "less than regulated" members of our society mentioned in the article..